South Americans triumph yet again, Brazil's Santa Cruz wins 3rd time!(Annapolis, MD- April 3-10)- The sun came out at last, the wind finally arrived and the 2009 J/24 World Championship came to an exciting end with three races jammed into the final day of competition.
With the vital worst-race throwout in play once the sailors had completed the day's first contest, standings shuffled quite a bit, and as 1996 World Champion Chris Larson of Annapolis and his National Sailing Hall of Fame team finished third in that race thet took the lead by the narrowest of margins, tied on points with Canadian Rossi Milev and his Clear Air crew.
With a third-place finish in the next race, Larson and his team, which included Dave Hughes, Moose McClintock, Steve Frazier, and Curtis Florence, pulled ahead a bit more, establishing a 2-point lead over 2006-2007 World Champion Mauricio Santa Cruz and his Brazilian team on Bruschetta, who now found himself winning the tiebreaker with Milev and setting up the final race as a real nail-biter to see who would emerge at the top of the highly competitive 76-boat fleet.
In the end, Santa Cruz and the Bruschetta crew, with a third in the seventh race to Larson's 11th and Milev's 14th, came away with a third J/24 World Championship, making him the second-most successful J/24 skipper in class history (Ken Read still holds the record with six titles) and the first non-US sailor to win a Worlds in this country. More info @ J/24 Worlds site. For cool videos check out Sailgroove.com or the T2P Video sites.
